


Things That Go Bump in the Night

by katamari



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Coffee, Gen, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 09:07:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8572507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katamari/pseuds/katamari
Summary: Jongdae's landed his dream job--working at Korea's famed Ghost Hospital! Amidst patrons who don't want to be scared, sympathetic coworkers and a barista, he meets one patron who changes his life (and face) forever. Chenpionships 2015.





	

His calendar had been marked for weeks. Every day, Jongdae woke up and painstakingly marked the days off with a fat red marker, then began the ritual of counting them off. He’d look back to the week before, and smile as he remembered how he thought the day would never get closer. There it was though, moving ever closer to the big red circle, decorated with hearts and smiley faces. No words were needed; he knew exactly what was going to happen. When his alarm clock rang out in the morning, he didn’t bother to hit snooze. It was finally time.  
The Day had come, and Jongdae burst out of bed, then took the fastest shower he ever had in his life before dashing out the door.  
He then immediately returned, as he figured his new boss, the police, and the nation at large would prefer it if he wore pants.  
Error rectified, he hopped onto the subway and made it to his station with two hours to spare—and while his new boss had emphasized the importance of punctuality, Jongdae realized that perhaps two hours was a bit too punctual. He resigned himself to having a long walk around the mostly-empty station, when he realized that he hadn’t eaten.   
He ducked into the nearest coffee shop once the open sign blinked on, and greeted the staff with a bright smile and his big announcement.  
“Today, I’m going to be a ghost!”  
From behind the counter, a sleepy-eyed barista stared confusedly at him. The custodian stopped sweeping for a moment, and even the coffee grinders seemed to go silent. Jongdae’s expression mirrored the confusion on their faces, when he realized his mistake.  
“….At the Ghost Hospital,” he clarified, quickly bowing in apology. “At the Ghost Hospital!”  
“I thought you were supposed to say good morning when you greet people,” the barista muttered. “Do you want something while you’re still human?”   
“Large coffee and a bagel, please.” Jongdae smiled sheepishly. “I forgot my manners. I’m sorry…” he glanced at the barista’s nametag,”—Minseok-nim.”   
The barista shrugged. “Don’t think anything of it. We get a lot of you actors from the Hospital here. I just don’t function this early in the morning.” He set the coffee to brewing, and Jongdae finally had a chance to sit down in one of the mismatched antique chairs and relax. He had to steady his nerves; he didn’t want to look like a moron in front of his boss. He sank further into the chair and stared at the gold-patterned wallpaper from another century and listened to the reedy classical music being piped in from somewhere near the faded ceiling. The shop had a certain calming ambience about it, and the smell of strong coffee and a toasted bagel served on clean but chipped serving ware only served to make the place feel more like home instead of one of those high-end shops that felt a little too much like a government building or hospital.  
“How’s everything?” Minseok asked, a perfunctory smile on his face.   
Jongdae swallowed a mouthful of coffee, hot and strong and pitch-black, just the way he liked it. “Really good,” he concluded. “It’s just what I needed today.”  
“Do you need anything else?”  
Jongdae started to shake his head when he had an idea. “You said that a lot of the actors from Ghost Hospital come here, right? Do you know anything about it?”  
“It’s not really my thing, but a lot of people seem to like it, but then I see them leaving.” The barista shrugged. “The rumor is that it’s really haunted, not just actors. I think that the whole thing is bull, that place seems way too new to have any legit spooks in there. Still…”  
“Still?” Jongdae prompted, eager for more information. His new boss hadn’t said a word about the site being _actually_ haunted, but that would be a pretty cool twist if that were the case. Sure, he didn’t really believe in ghosts, but he was always open to having his expectations twisted and broadened.  
“Still, I see a lot of people go in,” Minseok cautioned. “And they all come out; I’m not going to tell you that people have disappeared in there. But they all have this look about them, like they’ve seen something out of their worst nightmares. I don’t ask, but I watch them when they come in and get coffee after, and it’s eerily silent. It sucks, being here nights with no one to talk to, you know?”   
In his mind’s eye, Jongdae could see all the tables filled with silent guests, not a word spoken even as someone spilled their coffee on the floor. They didn’t even ask for a refill or order another, just sat there while the drink collected and pooled on their feet.  
“…Creepy,” he agreed.   
“I guess you’ll get to see what all the fuss is about,” Minseok pointed out. “It’s got the reputation of the scariest haunted house in Korea, and if the customers are any indication, it’s well-deserved.”  
_Or it’s tame and everyone who goes in gets freaked out by the reputation…_ Jongdae didn’t voice his thoughts. Still, it did look pretty menacing from the outside, and what wasn’t scary about the premise of it? While he had never been inside, he knew that it was supposed to be an abandoned hospital that tortured its patients, and supposedly the patients and staff still haunted its walls, all of them angry and looking for revenge.  
Jongdae said a mental prayer for his good health and glanced at his watch. “Crap!” he apologized to Minseok. “I’m going to be late.”  
“I’ll be here. I’m always here.” Minseok waved and watched as Jongdae hurried out, his mind set on meeting his boss and getting his assignment. He knew that by working there, his dream would come true.  
“…And if you look in the left corner, that closet is where we hide one of our actors. Generally this is one of the nurses, a la _Silent Hill_. Continuing forward.”  
Jongdae stifled a yawn as he looked on attentively—at least, he hoped it was attentive. Somehow, Luhan, his new boss, made the scariest attraction in Korea sound positively _dull_. Of course, with the lights on, the ambient noises off, and all the hiding places revealed, it didn’t look frightening in the least.   
“Are you two listening?” Luhan looked back at Jongdae and the other new hire, who suddenly straightened up and nodded.  
“Good, because this is important. You’ve got to know where the exits are for customers who get too scared, and it’s also important to lay off the customers who buy the talismans. They glow in the dark, so you’ll have no trouble seeing them. I tend to fire actors who can’t understand that ‘give them space’ means ‘scare them more.’”  
_Talisman, don’t grab them,_ Jongdae filed away his little slanting rhyme in his head. The last thing he wanted was to be fired from the first job he was excited for. “Yes, sir,” the boy agreed.  
“Now keep in mind that some of our guests, despite the talisman, tend to get very upset. We haven’t had any instance of guest-on-actor injury yet, but you definitely don’t want to be the first. After this, you’ll be led through proper procedure for upset guests.” Luhan pointed to an arrow on the wall. “These glow and lead to the secret exits.”  
 _Secret exits,_ Jongdae added, but he couldn’t really think of a rhyme for it. He doubted he really needed one.  
“Sir?” The other new hire timidly raised his hand, and Jongdae vaguely recalled his name being Jongin or something like that. He was never very good with names.  
“Yes?” Luhan stopped in mid-gesture to the next secret exit.  
“Those lights always work, don’t they? There hasn’t been a power outage or anything?”  
“We haven’t had a problem,” their boss repeated.   
It had to be perfectly safe to work there then, right? Jongdae zoned out again as their boss continued the lecture on paychecks and taxes. 

When night finally fell and the nervous crowds began to huddle at the entrance of the attraction, Jongdae’s energy always ramped up—and then straight back down once he saw that virtually everyone had bought one of the little talismans. That meant no good scares, only maybe a groan and popping out of something. No grabbing, no screaming, and he felt as though he could barely scare a young child, despite being made up as ‘tortured patient’ or ‘blood-thirsty doctor’. Word had gotten out: Buy the charm, and you were perfectly safe. Even Minseok had teased him during his morning coffee shop visits—how on earth could horror-loving Jongdae not be able to scare a fly? Jongdae would mutter something under his breath and sulk over his coffee (not realizing that Minseok was giving him a discount out of sympathy.)   
All he wanted to do was to scare people and give them a good time, and that wasn’t being allowed.   
“Just wait until it gets really hot,” Jongin, his new comrade-in-arms, would encourage. “Then people will _want_ to be scared for the chill!”  
“This always happens at the beginning of the summer,” Luhan would inform his new employees. “The customers are feeling out just how scary we can be before they stop buying the charms.”  
The weeks went by and there was little luck to be had. The beginning of summer turned to mid-summer, and fall was soon approaching. Jongdae was no longer cheerily greeting his friends, instead morosely punching in and heading straight to makeup. Was his first summer working his dream going to be a total bust?  
“Cheer up,” Jongin tried to console him, his face already smeared with greasepaint as he tried desperately to work on contouring lines, even as the heat melted his makeup. “It’s blazing hot, and we’re bound to have people who want a really good scare.”  
“I hope so…” Jongdae peeked outside at the line—and the amount of talismans that were being bought. He just wished Jongin’s optimism applied in real life.  
The line outside was getting long and loud, and unbeknownst to Jongdae, a group of three college friends were standing in line jostling each other and annoying the rest of the people in line, who rolled their eyes and bought their charms.  
“My friend said it’s totally not scary,” Junmyeon coaxed. “Come on, do you think that Chanyeol would lie?”  
What he wasn’t telling one of his friends, a tall, athletic young man who had all of the color drained out of his face, was that Chanyeol had bought an army of charms with him. Even if he had, he figured that Tao wasn’t going to believe him.  
“It’ll be fun,” Kyungsoo agreed, the third in their little trio. “Chanyeol’s right, they really toned down the haunts this year. Even a little kid could go through it.”  
“Yeah, and are you a little kid?” Junmyeon teased. “Little baby Tao-Tao?”  
“I’m not,” Tao insisted, but he still bought two charms anyway-one for each hand. He had spent the money, he wasn’t going to waste his admission ticket. It didn’t matter that he was terrified of ghosts, right?  
“You can just kick the ghosts away,” Kyungsoo teased. “Come on, Tao. It’s just some actors in bad makeup.”  
“I know that,” Tao insisted, but his grip tightened on his charms, just in case. The line was moving too fast for him, he was getting far too close to the front for his comfort. He was going to go through with it, though. Junmyeon and Kyungsoo had teased him too much for him to back out of the trip now.  
The entrance loomed closer and closer, and before Tao knew it, he was swallowed up by a dilapidated hospital waiting room, covered in signs warning potential patients to leave, and covered in what looked like blood and grime. He swallowed hard and his eyes darted around, but he didn’t even see any actors.  
“It’s the first room,” Junymeon stated, bored. “Aren’t they going to scare us already?”  
“It’s the charms,” Kyungsoo said. “They won’t do anything scary if they see them…” He glanced over at Junmyeon, an idea forming in his head-one that his friend somehow understood. He held up his finger first, and led the way into the next room, a narrow hallway filled with wheelchairs that seemed to move on their own.  
 _Pop in, pop out. Pop in, pop out. Lather, rinse, repeat._ Jongdae grumped to himself every time he saw the all-too familiar greenish glow of the charms. While he ached to really scare the pants off someone, he’d lose his job, and for some strange reason, he wanted to see if Jongin was actually right. It would be nice…  
“Three, two, one,” Junmyeon counted silently under his breath, and with a sharp yank and dash, Tao found himself completely alone in the hallway, now with no light to guide him.  
“Guys?” Tao called out, but only silence answered him. “This isn’t funny!”  
The silence continued as he wandered into the next room—there was no turning back, or he’d face the shame of being ‘Tao-Tao the baby’ for the rest of his life.  
“I’m not afraid…” his voice only wavered a little bit, but it was enough that Jongin, made up that evening as a vengeful ghost, took a chance to suddenly grab his shoulders.  
He’d find out later that the scream that Tao emitted was legendary, but he ducked away and moved on forward, trying to ignore the fingers brushing his sides, the gasps and groans that filled his ears. Someone without a talisman was a treat to scare, and the actors were getting their fill. Word spread like wildfire, and it quickly reached Jongdae that _finally_ , someone was brave enough to scare.  
He peered around one of the large morgue freezers. It was usually his least favorite room in the haunt because of how cold it was (and how the ‘dead patients’ had to wear thin hospital gowns), but this time he was on edge with excitement. He finally got to deliver the big scare, the one he had been waiting for all his life—  
The security cameras in the morgue room later offered this footage:  
 _22:14:07: Customer enters morgue alone.  
22:14:09: Actor Kim Jongdae emerges from hiding place and attempts to grab customer.  
22:14:12: Customer appears to scream and punches actor in face.  
22:14:14: Actor hits floor._  
“Some friends that kid’s got,” Jongin mumbled as he pressed another icepack to Jongdae’s swollen eye. Luckily the morgue was dark enough that Jongdae had been spared the brunt of the punch, but he had a nice black eye for a souvenir.   
Jongdae groaned, half out of pain and half embarrassment. “Boss said nothing like this has ever happened before.” He had the promise of paid days off, at least. The only thing that would have lain insult to injury would have been losing his job.   
“It’s not your fault,” Jongin tsked. “Look, I’ll buy you coffee. It’ll make you feel better?”  
“…And a chocolate croissant.” Jongdae was determined to nurse his pain through sweets.  
“I’ll even get you two,” his friend promised. “Seriously, you deserve it.”  
“As long as you’re buying it,” Jongdae agreed, following Jongin out of the haunt and back towards their favorite coffee shop, where as always, Minseok awaited.  
The barista bit back laughter as the two walked in. Jongdae’s eye and hangdog expression only grew more pitiable as the man’s eyes lighted up in recognition and he let out a loud groan. “Don’t you ever take a day off?”  
“When you’re not around,” Minseok joked as Jongin placed the order. “So what happened, Mr. Half-a-panda?”  
“I got socked,” Jongdae whined, and told the whole story. About how he finally had someone to scare, and the guy turned out to be a highly trained martial artist with a great left hook. “It _sucks_ and _hurts_ and…”  
“You wouldn’t happen to be talking about that guy, would you?” Miseok nodded to another table where a customer sat, his table weighed heavily with the shop’s delicious pastries. “He came in here close to tears.”  
Jongdae gasped, a little louder than he had expected. “That’s him! That’s the guy who socked me!”  
Tao looked up, a bite of chocolate cheesecake halfway to his mouth. He suddenly dropped his fork, where it clattered away on the floor. “I didn’t mean to!”  
“You should make friends,” Jongin encouraged, pushing Jongdae forward. He settled himself at a table with Minseok, in perfect eavesdropping distance.  
Jongdae awkwardly sat down, coffee and croissants in hand. “So, uh…”  
“Yeah…” Tao glanced guiltily at his mountain of treats. “…Do you want something? I can’t say I’m sorry enough.”  
“I’ve got my coffee,” Jongdae mumbled. The pair sat in an awkward silence, the lack of sound unnerving until Jongdae finally spoke. “If you don’t like being scared, why did you go to the Ghost Hospital?”  
That, apparently, was the question to ask. The whole story spilled out-about how Tao’s friends had found out about his secret ghost fear after a horror movie marathon, and how they spent days trying to think of the best ways to scare him further. He had finally gotten enough of it and yelled at them, only for them to dare him to go to the scariest haunted attraction in the country. They had decided to make it extra scary for him by taking away his talismans, and they didn’t even have the courage to wait around until he got out (since they knew very well just exactly what Tao was capable of doing.)  
Jongdae listened sympathetically. “I think I’d do the same thing if someone I thought was a friend locked me in a room with dogs. I’m terrified of them.”  
“Of _dogs?_ ” Tao’s eyes widened. “I’ve got two, and they wouldn’t hurt a fly, see?” He pulled out his phone to show Jongdae his lock screen, which displayed a photo of two identical balls of white fluff. “I wouldn’t lock you in a room with them, though. That’s just mean.”  
“So were those guys,” Jongdae agreed. “Hope you don’t plan on being friends with them any longer.”  
Tao sighed. “They were the only ones who hung out with me last semester. I’m going to be a second-year at the University of Seoul.”  
Jongdae’s eyes widened. “Seriously? Me too! I didn’t see you last year, though. I’m majoring in business, so I can run a place like Ghost Hospital one day. What about you?”  
“Sports Informatics,” Tao murmured. “I’m not sure what I want to do yet, though. Maybe I’ll teach.”  
“You could teach your dogs,” Jongdae teased and stole one of Tao’s tarts, making the other laugh. “It could be good practice.”  
“Do you think that maybe you’d want to go meet them?” Tao asked shyly. “I know you’re scared of them, but you could face your fear…they don’t bite. They’re too small.”  
Jongdae glanced over at Jongin, who was mouthing ‘MAKE OUT ALREADY’ at him in the most obnoxious way possible and rolled his eyes at his friend. “If it isn’t too much trouble. Then maybe we could talk some more.”  
“Yeah, let’s go!” Tao smiled at Minseok, a grin that Jongdae suddenly wished was directed at him. “Can I get these boxed up?”  
“Yeah, no problem,” Minseok agreed, whisking the uneaten desserts away.  
“Hey, if I’m going to meet your dogs to get over your fear, then maybe you should come back to Ghost Hospital,” Jongdae chanced. “This time with the charms…and I’ll go with you, too.”  
“Really?” Tao’s eyes sparkled and that shy smile appeared again, making Jongdae’s stomach flip. “Well, give me a couple of weeks and I’ll go again.”  
“Awesome!” Jongdae took the box from Minseok and pushed the door to the coffee shop open, leading the way to the station with happy chatter. Jongin waited until their voices faded before he breathed out and sank through the chair.  
Minseok looked at him with raised eyebrows. “We’re still open.”  
“I’m exhausted,” Jongin grumbled.   
The barista sighed and flipped the sign to closed. “You could at least stay corporeal enough to help me clean up.”  
“In the morning.” Jongin glanced up at Minseok with a wide grin. “So…you think they’ll flip when they find out?”  
“I think,” Minseok mused as the two slowly started to fade out, “that this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.”


End file.
